A shocking afternoon

After the slight distress of yesterday - when, on my 2nd day of teaching in Perth it was possibly the most beautifully warm, sunny day of the year and I was stuck indoors from 8.17 in the morning until 5.23 in the afternoon (even during my lunchtime when I had to have a meeting) and spent breaks looking with longing outdoors - today, which weather-wise went back to being rubbish, turned out to be epic.

It wasn't due to the roof guys, who were coming to spray a bit of the roof for damp, turning up on time; nor was it due to the meeting I had which went really well; and it wasn't even that I got an email from Mumsnet telling me I'd won a copy of a book.

I don't know if you remember, but on 24th April I told you that I'd been lucky enough to win a bag complete with posters from Nicola Morgan when she was promoting her latest copy of Blame My Brain, but I didn't win a book. Then she put an email out to say her publishers were offering 50 free copies through Mumsnet. For some reason I just thought I'd enter for the hell of it, even though I'm not a member, and I won! How great is that? Great... yes... but not epic.

This afternoon it was time for my poetry class. It's a really energising group of knowledgeable people, who are good fun and very willing to state their points of view, and we often spend most of our time laughing our way through our 2 hours and Jim, our enigmatic leader, is no shrinking violet when it comes to critiquing. So it was with trepidation that, as we had 20 minutes to go before finishing, I heard him say we were going to go over a short poem of mine.

We have to read our own poem and then someone else is invited to read it and then it's free-for-all critiquing time. Well this afternoon, for the first time ever for me, no-one said they could offer anything to make it better and what a wonderful poem it was. I was truly stunned. For all 13 people to say that they love a poem and not have a single thing they'd change is something extraordinary, and for Jim to say how much he liked it and wouldn't change a thing is epic. Truly epic.

And then as I was walking away from the class one of the women came up beside me and said, and I quote, 'I love your poems', and then she strode off.

I'm still in shock.